Accent

March 12th, a student, carrying a brand new trowel, bent down, observing something unusual on the ground. After a second's contemplation, he got up. "No, it's nothing," he said, then walked a few feet more before he bent over again. This time he called to a friend for help. They both began loosening the soil with their trowels. All over an area of a quarter mile, groups of men and women were doing the same thing.

These are the opening sentences in the notebook of A. Neal Hand, a Berkeley undergraduate student enrolled in Anthropology 195 in the Spring of 1958. In addition to the weekly lectures, the students were required to participate in field activities during weekends and for them professor René Millon had planned a survey of part of Sonoma County followed by two months of excavation in a prehistoric mound in Contra Costa. The initial survey was conceived to cover sites that were already known but some students took the initiative to record additional interesting locations like the old adobe shack featured in the photo below. Like many times before, at the end of the quarter all the objects collected by the students were cataloged under one accession number and the documentation filed in a binder bearing the same number. A peculiarity of these accessions is that in addition to the standard feature, stratigraphy and burial forms, the binders sometimes contained the student notebooks and, when required for their final grade, a more comprehensive paper, photos and drawings.

a student standing in front of the adobe shack, Sonoma County
Hearst Museum Archaeological Archives
Photo by Josepha Haveman, March 1958

Since the early fifties, the popularity of archaeology classes at Berkeley increased year after year and courses similar to Anthro 195 were then scheduled  at least every other semester or quarter, early on in conjunction with projects organized by the California Archaeological Survey and after 1961 under the auspices of the Department and the Archaeological Research Facility. The last group of undergraduate students to participate in a field class, enrolled in the Spring 1973 and excavated a site in Napa County under the direction of Thomas Hester. In two decades, students went as far as Nevada and Oregon, although over time, some places became more popular than others: the Philippi Ranch site was excavated for eight consecutive classes between 1950 and 1954; the Hotchkiss Mound was visited multiple times between 1953 and 1968; Napa Valley, with its numerous sites, was the most rewarding area in terms of sheer number of objects collected and accessioned by the museum. Undergraduate students are currently credited for about 30.000 catalog records, a number that is destined to grow as we continue working on the archives and database.

students working in a trench at the Philippi site, Fall 1951
Hearst Museum Archaeological Archives
Photo by Clement Meighan

Few months ago we had the chance to look into one archaeological collection with a long and convoluted history. Twenty five boxes of materials excavated in Napa Valley in the Springs of 1969 and 1970 under the direction of James Bennyhoff were delivered to the museum in 1985, via the University of Texas. 1970 was a seminal year for political and student unrest and 1970 - yet unbeknownst to him - was also going to be Bennyhoff last teaching experience at Berkeley, both events contributed to the tortuous and long way the material came back to California. My colleagues in Registration and Collections are taking care of the catalog and proper storage of this large assemblage, I am looking at the box of documents that came with it. What I found where few yellowish maps, two or three rolls of black and white film, few photographs, and two large binders of students field notes for a total of 1600 pages! So far, I haven't had the time to sit down and read them all but I have digitized them and so they can be used in the cataloging of the materials. I did, however, have the time to skim through some pages knowing by experience that, aside of the more professionally written notes, undergraduate students often added personal thoughts, not necessarily about the archaeological work per se, but also their feeling about it, about their companions, their professors and other aspects of life. Here are some excerpts from those diaries:

Another problem that made itself felt right away, is one of divided attention. There is so much to do, measure, record, draw map, photograph, look for surface material, listen to instruction, etc. etc.

Few days later, the same student grumbled that they couldn't go back to a previous locations to do a better job with their now superior skills. Another student in 1970 wrote at the beginning of the term:

The digging should be quite exciting. The valley is very beautiful and the weather will hopefully remain hot. The ratio of girls to fellows is about 2 or 3 to 1. I must keep my eyes open and hands off(?).

To which prof. Bennyhoff added in pen while grading the paper: you're kidding... Another student described the work done with her daily team and wrote:

We have named our pit "Pit Excedrin" with an as yet to be assigned number; the pit is a headache but we're trying to keep our senses of humor.

On a more somber note, some diaries have brief mentions of the events at Kent State and how UCB responded by cancelling most classes. Some students continued to go to NAP-57 on a volunteer basis (and their paper did not receive a grade) but the mood and the energy are not at their tops and some feel the excavation is now a lost cause. On May 24, 1970, two weeks after the killings at Kent State, one student wrote:

Nothing was done in N8-W3 [a test unit]. I had intended to do some work on my own in the pit but it was too god-awful hot, and I was in a general state of depression, so I did nothing.

That student is now a friend of mine, Preston Staley; he didn't go on to a career in archaeology but he came back to the museum some years ago and volunteered his time on various projects I had with the Egyptian collections. Over the year he told me many stories about the department and the museum in the late sixties and early seventies and they were all very interesting. I regret starting the work on Nap-57 after he left us as he would have been a valuable help.

Most students wrote a final page summarizing the work they had done during the dig, providing some results and personal observations. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many students walked away from the experience with little intention of continuing a career in archaeology and here is what some wrote:

Thus the value of my first digging experience lies not in what kinds of archaeological theories were or were not borne out by the excavation. rather, the actual taste of digging itself was of the greatest enjoyment to me. Archaeology had always seemed pretty dull to me, but after even a brief initial stint at it, I realize why people become so dedicated to it and have so much fun at it.

I will come away from this dig with mixed feelings, some disillusionment and much experience. It is difficult, for me at least, to grasp the total meaning of the activity I have submerged myself in for some 9 weeks. I wonder now, as I have wondered many times throughout the quarter, whether or not I will be able to stand the pace and exacting diligence it takes to be a professional anthropologist.

There are several extenuating circumstances that will have an effect on the interpretation of Nap 57. Some of these circumstances have to do with the structure of the class, and inevitably the organization of the university, and the many problems that rock its serenity. However this is no place for such discussions, I must only assume that they are taken into consideration. The circumstances that regard the site Napa 57 are the fact that it was pot hunted in 1930, it has been plowed and is now a walnut orchard, all of which devalue its importance as a site and put question on the information that may be accumulated here.

Anthro 133 students weeding the surface of the Peripoli site.
Hearst Museum Archaeological Archives

Photo by Donna Schmit, May 1969

Unfortunately, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to compile a comprehensive list of all the students who attended these classes in two decades but many of their names remain as signatures on the feature and burial sheets they filled while in the field. I admit I fancy searching the internet to see if any of them actually continued to study archaeology and made a career within the discipline. And I found many: among others, Clement Meighan, Sonia Ragir, Sylvia Broadbent and Gordon Grosscup had successful teaching careers; Frank Norick, Eugene Prince and Albert Elsasser ended up working for many years in this museum while Josepha Haveman, Patrick Hallinan and others experienced a shorter period of employment at Berkeley. In the final years of field classes, it is possible that some students found themselves working for CRM companies that started to flourish in those years rather than continue studying for an academic career.
Back in the Spring of 1958, a week of heavy rain ended the survey for the Anthro 195 class and only four students volunteered to drive to Sonoma County the last Sunday of April. One of them was A. Neal Hand and he described in his journal the final event of the survey.

Bennyhoff led this group into an orchard made swamplike by the rain. As one stepped through the ooze he made deep puddles.
A farmer stomped out of a nearby house and skated angrily down the dirt road in the pouring rain. Bennyhoff went to meet him.
"Yew git off this land!"
"We were just looking for..."
"Git off!"
"... the owner. Where is he?"
"Ah ain't sayin."
"What's your name?"
"Ain't sayin."
"... we're from the University of California and are surveying this site"
"In this rain?"
"Won't you tell us where the owner is so we can get permission to continue?"
"No!... Well he's in New York"
"Won't you tell me your name?"
"NO! Now git!"
"The University of California won't appreciate this"
"Sonny, I've been to school, too. Now git!"
The group went.

The above is not the sole attempt to render one person accent or speech to be found in the museum archives. In 1937, Ernest N. Johnson, an amateur collector from Stockton, corresponded with Edward Gifford about his dealings with other collectors of ancient artifacts. One of them, an Italian farmer, had a brief conversation with Johnson about stone pestles found on his property in the Delta and Johnson tried to reproduce that conversation "faithfully":

Yes, we finda one tom-tom; you know, biga rounda longa rock, likea clob, de indian fighta wit. Boy, you hitta one man data tom-tom, breaka da head, sure.

Mindful of my ex wife permanent frustration with my language skills, the day I found the letter I asked my friend Martina: do I sound like this to you? Her answer was a reassuring 'not really' but a few weeks later I was exchanging few words with another colleague about my vacations in Italy when, suddenly, she cheerfully said: oh, your accent got thicker!




students working and engaging with locals at the Hotchkiss Mound.

Archaeologist Richard Ambro☨ looking at the camera.
Hearst Museum Archaeological Archives

Photo by C. Clelow, June 1966